AnnouncementsResearch

2016 Innovator Award Recipients

February 27, 2016

The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2016 Stepping Strong Innovator Awards.

Every year, millions endure life-altering injuries from severe burns and broken bones. While timely, high-quality care is essential, innovation plays a vital role in improving outcomes. This year’s Stepping Strong Innovator Awards spotlight two groundbreaking projects that aim to transform treatment and recovery for these traumatic injuries.

Michael Weaver, MD, competed in a global public voting competition that drew over 2,600 votes across all 50 states and 56 countries. His project, 21st Century Tools to Measure Bone Healing, emerged from the Stepping Strong Clinical Innovation Series in Trauma, a five-part series of events in which participants came together to define a problem, refine key issues and challenges, and develop a solution.

Meanwhile, the project led by Reza Abdi, MD, New Hope for Trauma Patients with Severe Burn Injuries, was selected by a committee during a closed-door session for its potential to reshape burn care and recovery.

Reza Abdi, MD

New Hope for Trauma Patients with Severe Burn Injuries

One of the primary goals in managing burn wounds is early wound closure—a critically important procedure that can prevent burn patients from dehydration, infection, and death. However, the process of effectively closing wounds remains a challenging practice. Using skin grafts from a patient’s own body is the best approach, but that is often not possible with severe burn patients. Patients universally reject cadaveric skin, usually within 10 days. To solve for this, Reza Abdi, MD, and his team have developed an innovative approach to creating skin allografts for burn patients. Using an implantable bioactive gel embedded with mesenchymal stem cells that suppress rejection, the team plans to microengineer off-the-shelf, ready-to-use implantable skin. This advanced technology will allow for rapid closure of wounds, which in turn will help to shorten hospital stays and, most importantly, improve survival rates through a critical period of recovery.

21st Century Tools to Measure Bone Healing

Millions of people break bones every year as a result of traumatic injuries. While there are numerous drugs to treat medical problems like high blood pressure or asthma, there are no medications to help heal broken bones. The reason for this deficit is that, with current technology, it is impossible to accurately measure bone healing, making drug trials difficult to perform. To solve for this, Michael Weaver, MD, and his team, comprising biomechanics specialists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and pharmacology experts at Massachusetts General Hospital, are developing a device that precisely measures microscopic changes in bone and how much motion occurs between the bone ends at a fracture site. The goal is to spur bone healing drug development, reduce pain, and ultimately improve the speed of recovery.

To learn more about how Weaver’s new tool for measuring broken bones may help shorten recovery, view this WCVB article.

Michael J. Weaver, MD

Amid a critical gap in trauma research funding, The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation catalyzes multidisciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration to transform care for civilian and military heroes recovering from traumatic injury.